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This, I think, is part of what killed modern ARPGs like Titan Quest/Grim Dawn/Adventures of Van Helsing for me. In Diablo 1 it wasn't a big deal; magic items were common but not overwhelmingly so, artifacts were extremely rare, and the affixes directly mapped to the magical effects -- and while there were a lot of affixes you could still remember vaguely what they all did, or at least, which ones were and weren't potentially useful to your character. Diablo 2 escalated things somewhat with the introduction of rares and sockets, but still wasn't too bad; I think Lord of Destruction was about at the upper limit of what I can handle when it comes to fiddly item sorting bullshit. But every subsequent imitator has ratcheted things up even further. Van Helsing, the most recent one I played, doesn't even have affixes; instead each item just drops with a random set of modifiers on it. Mechanically, it's like every single thing is a D2 rare, and it's infuriating. Especially since there's more stats to worry about and most of the bonuses are minor. ToME4 kind of has the same problem, but (a) I find it mechanically more enjoyable so I'm willing to cut it more slack and (b) it provides better tools for managing the giant flood of trash, although I wish it were less of a flood to begin with. tl;dr bring back D1-style "Diablo-style" loot
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Oct 10, 2018 23:54
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Diablo-style loot is extremely good and the biggest problem with ToME's itemization is that a couple of specific fixedarts are way better than randarts have any chance of being. I wanna dissect this a bit since it's a topic I think warrants some discussion. First, we've gotta agree that "good" vs "bad" is entirely subjective unless we have an agreed-upon framework by which to evaluate things. "Is it fun" doesn't work because what's fun for you may not be fun for me. For example, in the case of Diablo 2, I liked it for a variety of reasons but random rares and the trading economy built around gear were probably my least favorite aspects of the game and actively deterred me from playing it. I'll get back to what my framework for "good vs bad" is in a bit but I just wanted to start with that. Games are fun for a lot of reasons. For me, a big draw of games with character-based progression, such as roguelikes or RPG's, is creating the kind of character that I want to create. The way I like to engage with that process is by planning my character first and then executing my plan. For example, I really enjoyed Dark Souls 3 because I had that game completely mastered, knew where everything was, and was able to create a variety of characters that I really enjoyed. I would spend the first and sometimes second runs getting the gear and stats that I needed, then from NG+2 on I'd have my perfectly constructed character and have a blast playing it. That is why procgen loot really dampens my enthusiasm for a game. With procgen, you are forced to react to what the game gives you. For some people, that process is fun. It is not fun for me, it is pure irritation. Roguelikes already force you to react to a variety of unforeseeable situations. Having that forced reactivity enter into character creation/optimization is a total non-starter for me. So that's why I don't find procgen loot fun. However, that's not why I think it's bad. That is a lot more theoretical and not something that I expect people to necessarily agree with. First, let's get back to my criteria for good vs bad. For me, one of the frameworks I use to decide what makes a good or bad mechanic is whether you would do things that way in an "ideal world". Put another way, if you could throw infinite hours and talent at a game, how would you design it? Remember, this isn't about whether or not people can enjoy a given mechanic, this is simply the framework I use to decide whether a mechanic is "good" or not. So here's the rub: I think that procedurally generated loot is a fundamentally bad mechanic for the following reason: in a perfect world, you would design all loot by hand. Procedural generation is only utilized because it allows developers to present players with a nearly infinite set of circumstances. However, I think we can all agree that (skilled) human-designed content is almost always more enjoyable than procedurally generated content. We just accept the latter because it is often approximate enough that it's fine and the value of having a new and different experience each time outweighs the value of having that experience be handcrafted. However, if you could have infinite intentionally crafted worlds/items/monsters/etc, you would opt for that every time, because the procedures that we use are simply not as good at it as a skilled human. The natural response to all of that is probably "well then you must consider all procgen to be bad" and yes, at a certain level, I do. However, that doesn't mean I can't or don't enjoy procgen, I do obviously, or I wouldn't be posting in the roguelike thread. Remember this whole section is more about the framework of whether something is "good" or not. Fun does not equal good. Getting back to enjoyment/fun, there's essentially two factors that govern whether I like procgen or not. The first is whether the procedural generation is close enough to human output that it doesn't make a huge difference. Dungeons in ToME are an example of this, the procedural generation does a decent enough job of creating interesting situations that it doesn't bother me much. All I really want from a dungeon in ToME is a mildly interesting space that allows me to use my character to kill monsters. Procgen can handle that. The second factor is that the procgen needs to not get in the way of my enjoyment of the game. This is where procgen loot (as it's implemented in many games) falls short for me. It interferes with how I want to engage with the game to such a significant extent that I can't look past it. I would actually be able to enjoy procedurally generated loot in a game like ToME if it was implemented in a way that gave me more control. A crafting system perhaps, or maybe intentional placement of certain handcrafted uniques that I could plan my runs around. Anyways, that's probably a bit of a confusing mishmash, as it's essentially two posts ("Why I don't like ToME procgen loot" and "One of the frameworks I use for deciding whether a game mechanic is good or bad") but I hope it made some sense. I think procedural generation is a really interesting tool that we will only get better at using. Presumably at some point we will even get good enough at it that I'd have to put it in the "good" category, at least under my current criteria for that. Until then however, it'll remain a stopgap solution to an otherwise unsolvable problem and all we can do is hope devs use it well instead of poorly.
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Oct 11, 2018 00:47
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Hello thread, RogueCel was really fun why weren't you there? I gave a talk on storytelling in roguelikes it's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd7K0EmkvPk Zircon gave a talk on tuning difficulty in Tangledeep it's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gluz5nIplcA Kyzrati, the Cogmind guy, gave an excellent talk on how to make a roguelike, and also showed off like 100 small roguelikes that this thread should be all up ons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jviNpRGuCIU Watch that one first actually. Then watch mine and not Zircon's so I can get more views. Harry Potter on Ice posted:Dungeonmans is pretty sweet, finally giving it a shot after thinking it looked like poo poo.  Well thank you!My time has been all Tangledangles recently, and that's a good thing because the Switch build is crescent fresh and will hopefully be available for purchase in short order. Nintendo is putting it through certification. I do have a little breathing room to put out another dmans patch, though this one will be mostly bug fixes. The current build is Bad, it's extra crashy and I'm not happy about that. I finally have some time to make corrections. If you have been experiencing crashes while playing, please let me know. You can always swing by the Discord, https://discord.gg/stremf, if you want to drop off your thoughts there. Kyzrati's talk was so good, I mean it. I got bit with a new RL idea while watching it in person and I won't speak a word about it until it is playable.
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Oct 11, 2018 01:43
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madjackmcmad posted:Nintendo is putting it through certification. yay the thing ive been waiting for
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Oct 11, 2018 01:51
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"The wall of words", or, Jim Shepard accurately describes my #1 problem with Pillars of Eternity. I like reading. I like fantasy stories. I'll read visual novels, I'll read books in games, etc etc etc. But god, mixing walls of words with more intricate gameplay is a great way to make me feel like I'm working. I inevitably turn combat difficulty in PoE to easy because c'mon, I need to focus on the reading - IS THAT AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR JUPITER HELL HOW MUCH DID HE PAY YOU, JIM
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Oct 11, 2018 01:58
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Madjack's talk was really good and you should watch it if you enjoy the hobby of making the games.
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Oct 11, 2018 03:26
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the problem with tome loot is that there's too much fiddly numbers to compare and it's basically impossible to actually understand how any two items are actually functionally different. it just becomes information overload for me and my eyes glaze over and i start getting a headache I've been playing a bunch of *bands recently and I really like how they do loot but I'm not smart enough to justify that opinion in any way
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Oct 11, 2018 08:27
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https://twitter.com/GoldenKroneGame/status/1050352136691884033?s=19
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Oct 11, 2018 13:03
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That tweet sounds about right. I remember posting something like Golden Krone feeling simple and that it wouldn't hold my interest for long. I have 60+ hours in GKH.
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Oct 11, 2018 15:17
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Charlie Bobson posted:the problem with tome loot is that there's too much fiddly numbers to compare and it's basically impossible to actually understand how any two items are actually functionally different. it just becomes information overload for me and my eyes glaze over and i start getting a headache Thats where I'm at on the proc gen loot. I like the idea but I think having mandatory stats as a gear check like resistances and stun immunity in Tome is not great design.
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Oct 11, 2018 15:50
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Yeah, ToME4's stat and loot granularity wouldn't be nearly as frustrating if it weren't for the massive importance of certain annoyingly granular (and kinda uncommon) attributes like stun/freeze immunity. It's also tremendously irritating when you're like 80% immune, but eat a stun anyway and get stomped.
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Oct 11, 2018 15:54
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Angry Diplomat posted:It's also tremendously irritating when you're like 80% immune, but eat a stun anyway and get stomped.
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Oct 11, 2018 17:30
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Humans are bad at statistics, and especially when the consequences are dire, it feels super-bad to fail an 80% or 90% roll. I seem to recall that Nintendo's XCOM game (Mario + Rabbids?) only uses 0%, 50%, or 100% odds for random events? Which seems like a good take, honestly: you either know things are guaranteed to play out a certain way, or else they're guaranteed to be a coinflip and you know you're trusting to fate. You're never put in a situation where things are probably going to work out in your favor but might fail. That's kind of tricky to roll up into a game with Diablo-style loot, especially if you want the player to be able to assemble a thorough defense out of a bunch of small boosts. It's not entirely clear to me that that's an explicit design goal though, so I feel like a lot of games could benefit from more of their equipment modifiers being binary, at least when they apply to whether or not something will succeed (like paralysis resistance or spell failure rate).
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Oct 11, 2018 17:40
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Humans are bad at statistics, and especially when the consequences are dire, it feels super-bad to fail an 80% or 90% roll. I seem to recall that Nintendo's XCOM game (Mario + Rabbids?) only uses 0%, 50%, or 100% odds for random events? Which seems like a good take, honestly: you either know things are guaranteed to play out a certain way, or else they're guaranteed to be a coinflip and you know you're trusting to fate. You're never put in a situation where things are probably going to work out in your favor but might fail. Obviously you wouldn't display all the status effect meters all the time unless you only had like, one or two, or it's always relevant to know your current status like if it was a "Hot/Cold" meter in a game where temperature is a big deal. Just make it pop up as soon as it's got anything in it to track.
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Oct 11, 2018 19:23
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Zereth posted:Instead of a random chance to inflict paralysis, you could have attacks which can inflict it fill up a Paralysis Meter, and once it gets full you get paralyzed. Make it visible to the player, and then you can either have resistance either reduce how fast the meter gets filled up, or make it longer. A similar mechanic I've considered is having a sort of ablative status-effect shield; when somebody tries to put an effect on you, you roll to resist it but get a big bonus based on how full your shield is. When the shield is full, you're guaranteed (or almost guaranteed) to resist; when it's empty, you almost certainly won't. If you fail, you get poisoned or whatever, but if you pass, you lose some of the shield so later attempts will be more likely to stick. So if you're casting a weak spell at somebody it'll probably fail the few few times and then finally succeed. And if you want to ensure a specific spell will stick, you can wear away their resistance by casting other stuff at them.
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Oct 11, 2018 19:57
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Zereth posted:Instead of a random chance to inflict paralysis, you could have attacks which can inflict it fill up a Paralysis Meter, and once it gets full you get paralyzed. Make it visible to the player, and then you can either have resistance either reduce how fast the meter gets filled up, or make it longer. That's exactly how the Dark Souls series handles status conditions, and I'm a big fan of it. Resistance lowers the speed at which the bar fills, so you always have to watch your butt, but not so much if you've stacked the resistance.
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Oct 11, 2018 20:00
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Once I have spent an hour comparing 2 random items to decide which one to use I just figure I may as well stick with whichever I was using in the first place.
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Oct 11, 2018 20:28
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If I could change one thing about ToME it'd be replacing a lot of status effects as well as haste/speed with the Tangledeep extra turn bar. No more 'so I've got 130% global speed, 150% attack speed but I'm slowed by 30%, is this going to result in that randboss getting 2 turns and killing me??'. Having a turn bar that goes from -100 to 100, where at either extreme you lose/gain a turn can replace a ton of the small, miscellaneous debuffs and effects.
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Oct 11, 2018 20:29
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suggest it to the dev
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Oct 12, 2018 05:15
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Playing Streets of Rogue with a couple of friends, we decided to try a party with a bit of subtlety. Assassin, Thief, Hacker. What ensued was a multi-floor murderbrawl that ended with more than half of the city's population dead in various riots, only some of which were caused by zombies, and only one of the zombie outbreaks was because we accidentally hit the supernatural jail with a rocket launcher. The assassin class has one tool in the bag, and that tool is murder, which also has a magical way of opening locked doors when nobody is left to hold the key. Baffled guards trying to figure out why their friend was dead and their generator exploded sometimes shot other civilians which lead to still more chaos. The hacker class is just plain a public safety menace. Hacking fridges causes them to launch themselves directly forward in whichever direction they're facing, through any other non-steel buildings in the way. Hacking regular computers can often release gas, which then releases guards which the assassin then would attempt to murder. Hacking security robots is just hilarious and should be done all the time. The thief actually was capable of some subtle intrusion, especially after buying off Suspicious. Unfortunately one thing that was bought on was the "Wall Walloper" trait, and so indiscriminately swinging baseball bats around collapsed a lot of local architecture. This did uncomplicate many missions but resulted in a lot of noise and cops who mysteriously ended up bludgeoned to death. We got to the final level and barely did anything before the people all started shooting each other. The Mayor died in a hail of other peoples' bullets and his hat was just lying there in the open. The thief went for it and got gunned down by a supercop...who got gunned down by a haywire robot. The robot then picked up the hat. The thief, having gained resurrection, tried to shoot the robot but accidentally knocked it into a pit. A collective gasp went up, and what was left of the city fell into chaos as the only means of establishing political order was lost forever. FOREVER. We were all awarded the BAD ENDING. We did manage the finish the thief and assassin Big Quests, the hacker didn't even want to mess with his since it spawned killer robots every time--but now I sort of think that might have been a mistake. In conclusion, Streets of Rogue is a fun little sociopathic murderfest with some very amusing interactions among elements. I hope the dev keeps adding those kinds of little details, and this game is a nice (for certain values of "nice) way to spend an hour or two with buddies creating absolute anarchy.
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Oct 12, 2018 13:13
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Anybody played "Shortest Trip to Earth"? It looks like a more complicated FTL, which might make it awesome af
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Oct 12, 2018 16:28
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Put me in the Diablo style loot sucks camp. It introduces way too much inventory churn. I don't enjoy spending significant amounts of time mousing over every thing in my inventory so I can tell if this particular affix is better than another. My enjoyment of loot is also inversely proportional to how much I get. If I'm getting piles of loot constantly none of it matters to me.
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Oct 12, 2018 23:11
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 Dungeonmans bugfix patch today! There's been some instability in the latest build, and I've finally had time to right some wrongs and patch over some potholes. No new content today, but here's the fixes: code:
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Oct 12, 2018 23:15
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Diablo-style loot is pretty good. Diablo 2 style loot nearly perfected it and few other games have come even close. Diablo 3 style loot sucked the soul and interest out of it whatsoever. Torchlight/Torchlight 2 loot is absolute loving garbage and just a meaningless mishmash of random affixes and modifiers that mean absolutely nothing because they fundamentally all do the exact same thing (damage) and there's barely any difference between them. Procedurally generated or not, you have to make your item modifiers actually interesting and having different impacts. If all your modifiers boil down to "This does more damage", or if your different sources of damage boil down to "This does more damage, except against enemies with this specific resistance," and nothing else, then it's meaningless noise.
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Oct 13, 2018 04:37
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PostNouveau posted:Anybody played "Shortest Trip to Earth"? It looks like a more complicated FTL, which might make it awesome af ooh. I'm almost tempted to grab it. I'll look at it again tomorrow.
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Oct 13, 2018 04:59
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Well, since we were talking about Bionic Dues a bit, I decided to go play some. There are definitely some fun interactions in this game. You can whistle to alert every enemy within your sensor range of your presence if you'd rather they come to you. Since this level was wide open and chock full of enemies (including 20 range Blaster Bots), why not have my Science exo with like 40 sensor range pull the entire room into a firing line of turrets?  It does make turns go a bit slow, since every bot acts individually, but probably still faster than clearing them out normally.
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Oct 13, 2018 07:00
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High trapskill turrets are ludicrously efficient. A decent amount of an individual Bionic Dues level is figuring out how to make your ammo last for the entire thing. You'll generally have some "win button" weapons, but nowhere near enough ammo to use them on everything. Then there's turrets, where your ammo count is based on how many items you can equip with "gives +N additional turrets" and their damage is based on how high your trapskill is. It doesn't take long until each individual turret has like 30 ammo and massively more health than your exos can ever have.
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Oct 13, 2018 15:21
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Well, don't know if it changed at some point, but turret ammo is fixed at 10. Shields, damage and range do all go up with trapskill though. Still amazingly efficient.
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Oct 13, 2018 16:08
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PostNouveau posted:Anybody played "Shortest Trip to Earth"? It looks like a more complicated FTL, which might make it awesome af Based on an hour or so of play, there's a ton of potential but the interface is sort of clunky. In particular, it's a bit annoying to A) identify what your crew is up to and B) who still needs assignment to stuff, which is a bit of a problem in an FTLlike. also I can't find the pause hotkey, space puts it in slowtime instead, I don't want to have to click it all the time
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Oct 13, 2018 21:28
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Based on an hour or so of play, there's a ton of potential but the interface is sort of clunky. Hmmmm, maybe I'll watch a few LPs before I decide on buying it then
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Oct 14, 2018 05:33
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Lost my first Dungeonmans guy at level 6 to a monster party  Rolled a Wizard which seemed strong though I don't know how much of that is the starting bonuses and how much of that is the class. I assume that if I can get back to where my dude died I can maybe get something good out of it? E: Also I keep seeing Headless Headsman enemies and they all drop Trick or Treat baskets 
C-Euro fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Oct 14, 2018 |
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Oct 14, 2018 22:31
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I love the hell out of Synthetik but the disco room is loving bullshit. And not the fun type of bullshit.
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Oct 14, 2018 22:59
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Lost my most successful angband character after getting repeatedly dragged into a mob of wyrms and sorcerers by a tengu. stings especially considering how lucky I had gotten with items this run. A thanc was just lying on the ground somewhere in the first 10 floors and carried me all the way to my death.
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Oct 15, 2018 00:12
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So thread, I was thinking... Suppose, hypothetically, that someone was going to play and review a bunch of roguelikes on Steam by the end of this year. Let's say 12 of them. What would be the new and/or notable ones you would want to read about? It might also help to assume that this someone had done this for the past three years, too.
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Oct 15, 2018 01:09
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Too Shy Guy posted:So thread, I was thinking... Suppose, hypothetically, that someone was going to play and review a bunch of roguelikes on Steam by the end of this year. Let's say 12 of them. What would be the new and/or notable ones you would want to read about? SYNTHETIK is one, depending on how hard your definition of roguelike is. Just got a massive update too.
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Oct 15, 2018 01:11
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Roluth posted:SYNTHETIK is one, depending on how hard your definition of roguelike is. Just got a massive update too. Agreed. As for my suggestion, have you done Nongunz yet?
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Oct 15, 2018 01:20
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Too Shy Guy posted:So thread, I was thinking... Suppose, hypothetically, that someone was going to play and review a bunch of roguelikes on Steam by the end of this year. Let's say 12 of them. What would be the new and/or notable ones you would want to read about? Slay the Spire should probably on that list if you're talking notability.
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Oct 15, 2018 01:32
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Everspace, sublevel zero, caveblazers
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Oct 15, 2018 01:42
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CAVES OF QUD
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Oct 15, 2018 01:45
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Too Shy Guy posted:So thread, I was thinking... Suppose, hypothetically, that someone was going to play and review a bunch of roguelikes on Steam by the end of this year. Let's say 12 of them. What would be the new and/or notable ones you would want to read about? 868-Hack, Desktop Dungeons, AuroraRL, Cogmind, Consuming Shadow, Midboss, Morphblade, NEO Scavenger, One Way Heroics, Unexplored. I'm really curious as to your thoughts on 868-Hack, as it's a true classic in the genre, imo.
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Oct 15, 2018 01:58
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